national question

Moscow, September 2, 2008 -- To most Russians, it was obvious from the
beginning that the latest war in the Caucasus began with an attack by Georgian
forces on South Ossetia, and that ultimately it was unleashed on the
initiative of the United States. To the West, meanwhile, it was just as clear
from the outset that the August war in the Caucasus represented
an assault on small, defenceless and democratic Georgia by huge,
aggressive and authoritarian Russia. This is what almost all the world media have
asserted, and continue to assert. To a significant degree, this is even believed by a significant section
of world civil society, including by anti-globalisation activists who for the
most part have little sympathy for the US
establishment.

August 18, 2008 -- The communally and politically motivated May 26 decision of the Congress Party-People's Democratic Party (PDP) government of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir to transfer forest land [in Muslim-majority Kashmir] to the Hindu Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB) [for use as a pilgrimage site near a sacred Hindu cave] is having costly repercussions, with the added danger that it may emerge as a communal [flashpoint] nationally.

The land transfer, taken in the context of irresponsible official remarks recommending changes in the demography and “culture” of the region as a “solution” to the Kashmir “problem”, was like a spark to the tinderbox of pent-up resentment in the Kashmir Valley. Lives were lost when police opened fire on protesters; the PDP tried to distance itself from its ministers’ decision in favour of the land transfer by pulling out of the government; and the government on July 1 was belatedly forced to roll back the land transfer decision.

August 27, 2008 -- Since the European Union-brokered ceasefire brought the shooting war between Georgia and Russia to an end on August 12, there has been a war of words between Russia and the West. One point of contention is the withdrawal of Russian troops from
Georgia-proper (that is, Georgia excluding the de facto independent
territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia), in particular the towns of
Gori, Zugdidi and Senaki and the port of Poti.

The war began with Georgia’s August 7 attack on the territory of
South Ossetia. Russia responded with a military assault that first
drove Georgian troops out of South Ossetia, then continued to advance
within Georgia-proper.

Russia agreed to withdraw when it signed the ceasefire and has
since indicated that it is doing so — but slowly, and not before
systematically destroying Georgia’s military capacity.

A bigger difference, based on competing interpretations of what is
and isn’t Georgian territory, is Russia’s stated intention to maintain
a beefed-up peacekeeping presence in South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

August 16, 2008 -- On August 7, after a week of border clashes, Georgia's pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili launched a military attack against South Ossetia.

South Ossetia, while internationally recognised as part of Georgia, has
been predominantly under the control of a pro-independence
administration since Georgia separated from the former Soviet Union in
1991. Since a 1992 ceasefire, the South Ossetian statelet has been protected by Russian peacekeepers.

Within 24 hours, Georgian troops had taken the South Ossetian
capital, Tskhinvali, after destroying much of it with artillary. More
than 30,000 refugees (out of a population of 70,000) fled across the
border to the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania, which is part of the
Russian Federation.

Using this, and the killing of 20 Russian peacekeepers, as
pretexts, Russia intervened in full force: bombing targets throughout
Georgia, driving the Georgians out of South Ossetia (including
territory not previously held by the South Ossetian administration) and
crossing into Georgia-proper to take the town of Gori.

Teacher and
actor Brian Jones educated and moved his audience with his talk, ``Martin Luther
King's
last struggle'' at the United States' International Socialist
Organization's ``Socialism 2008'' conference in Chicago on June 20,
2008.

Since 1999, Jones has portrayed Karl Marx in Howard Zinn's play Marx
in Soho in US tours. He lent his voice to the audio recording of
Noam Chomsky's book Hegemony or Survival and to several staged
readings from Zinn's latest book, Voices of a People's History of the
United States. He is a teacher in New York and contributes frequently to
the Socialist Worker newspaper and the International Socialist Review
magazine.

Socialism conferences are sponsored annually by the Center for Economic
Research and Social Change, publisher of International Socialist Review
and Haymarket Books. Conferences are co-sponsored by the International
Socialist Organization, publisher of Socialist Worker and Obrero
Socialista.

August 10, 2008 -- Much of the world is
fascinated by the current US presidential election. The
main reason is because the United States is ready to do something that most
developed countries would never consider doing: electing a representative from
an oppressed minority as head of state.

At the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games the enduring image was
Tommie Smith and John Carlos, African-American athletes, raising
their gloved clenched fists in support of the Black Power movement
during the ``Star Spangled Banner''. They were subsequently banned from the games for life. Black Power Salute looks at what inspired them to make their
protest, and what happened to them after the Games. Featuring Tommie Smith, Lee Evans, Bob Beamon and Delroy Lindo. Click HERE for parts 2-6.

Also read about Peter Norman, the Australian athlete who gained third place, who supported Smith's and Carlos' protest. Norman is the subject of a new documentary, Salute, which can be previewed here.

[The general line of this report was adopted by the June 12-14, 1999 DSP National Committee plenum. Text is taken from The Activist, volume 9, number 5, 1999]

On Wednesday March 24, 1999, the secretary-general of NATO, former
Spanish social-democratic minister of culture Javier Solana, told a
press conference: "I have just given the order to the Supreme Commander
of Allied Forces in Europe, United States General Wesley Clark, to begin
air operations against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia."

The following day 371 NATO warplanes undertook bombing raids and
six NATO warships in the Adriatic launched cruise missiles against
targets in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Between March 25 and the cessation of NATO bombing raids on June
9, more than 30,000 combat missions had been flown by NATO warplanes
against Yugoslavia. Thousands of civilians in Serbia have been killed or
wounded. Millions of Serbian workers are now living without
electricity, or water, or jobs. Factories, power stations, houses,
hospitals, bridges and roads have been destroyed or damaged. The
destruction of oil refineries and petrochemical plants have poisoned the
air, rivers and soil of Serbia with toxic products. It has been
estimated that the reconstruction of damaged or destroyed infrastructure
will cost between $US15-50 billion.

June 16, 2008 -- Over the past decade, a new rise of mass struggles in Latin America
has sparked an encounter between revolutionists of that region and many
of those based in the imperialist countries. In many of these
struggles, as in Bolivia under the presidency of Evo Morales,
Indigenous peoples are in the lead.

Latin American revolutionists are enriching Marxism in the field of
theory as well as of action. This article offers some introductory
comments indicating ways in which their ideas are linking up with and
drawing attention to important but little-known aspects of Marxist
thought.

How
true it is that nothing lasts forever. Bolivia’s exploited classes, of
mainly indigenous origin, are now confronting more than five centuries of
exclusion. This territory’s original inhabitants were subjugated by the cross
and the sword during the colonial period, they were harassed and had their
lands taken from them under the Republic, and their culture was ignored during
the bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1952. Now, as they finally take state
power by democratic means at the beginning of the 21st century, the dominant
minority accuses them of wanting to install the ``first racist, fascist state
in Latin America’’.

The current historical juncture is characterised by a profound crisis of the market economy, of liberal democracy and of the very foundations of the old republican colonial state, a monocultural, centralist and exclusionary state that has remained intact since the foundation of the Republic.

``America, this is our moment’’, stated
Barack Obama on June 3 after winning enough delegates to become the presumed presidential
nominee for the Democratic Party. Obama becomes the first African American in
the history of the country to be nominated by one of the ruling parties. It
happened on the evening of June 3 as the final two primaries occurred in Montana and South Dakota, where he and his main
opponent New York Senator Hillary Clinton won one state each.

I feel forced to write to correct some confusion that has been circulating regarding the current US ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg, who has been supporting the so-called ``autonomy'' referendum by the Bolivian oligarchy.

A continuous line has come out that Goldberg ``has experience in partition'' because he allegedly participated in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. This tends to be a secondary point alongside a more general point that erroneously compares actual oppressed nations, such as the Kosovar Albanians, the poorest people in Europe, who have striven for independence for over a century, with the rich oligarchy of low-lands Bolivia, engaged in an imperialist-backed destabilisation of the Bolivian revolution.

Along with Kosova, some also list Tibet and other examples of so-called ``secessionism'' as being related to the Bolivian oligarchy's campaign. One feels compelled to add Palestine, Eritrea, Bangladesh, East Timor, Aceh, Tamil Ealam and other national liberation struggles by oppressed peoples just to make it consistent.

Raising the Red Flag: The International Socialist League and the Communist Party of South Africa 1914-1932By Sheridan JohnsMayibuye Books, Bellville, South Africa1995, 309pp.

Review by Norm Dixon

Mayibuye
Books specialise in publishing works relating to South Africa's
liberation struggle, most by participants in the movement. Under
apartheid many valuable works were suppressed. Now free to publish
anything, it may seem strange that Mayibuye would decide to publish a
book that began as an unpublished thesis by an obscure US academic 30
years ago. Strange or not, it is a decision to be welcomed.

The groundswell of broad support for Barack Obama (both among Blacks and whites) is a phenomenon that deserves a serious analysis and understanding. It cannot be downplayed by passing it through the lens of pure-and-simple lesser-evilism.

Some radicals dismiss the mass phenomenon, because Obama is a candidate of a ruling-class party. That simplistic rejection of Obama's campaign and its mass support is sectarian: The issue isn't whether to vote for a Democrat, but rather our response to a development that is having a wide-scale impact. How many times, in state after state, have we ever seen citizens of all races line up for hours to hear an African-American man talk about “hope'', on a platform that is fundamentally no different than his opponents?

April 26, 2008 -- The
protests and arrests in Lhasa and the demonstrations and
counter-demonstrations around the Olympic torch relay has re-focused
the world on the plight of Tibetans. This has, in turn, sparked a
debate on the left about whether the Tibetan struggle is a just one, or
not what it seems.
The Socialist Alliance national executive decided at its April meeting
that the right to self-determination applies as much to the Tibetans as
to any other people. It’s not for others to decide according to some
private benchmark of oppression whether or not the Tibetans are
“really” oppressed. Obviously, the protests in Lhasa and other centres
reflect deep feelings of discrimination and alienation: these things
cannot be manufactured.

In this context it is irrelevant that some in the West, especially
high-profile Hollywood followers of the Dalai Lama, believe in the
weird delusion that old theocratic Tibet was a Shangri-la that was
cruelly destroyed by the “Chinese communist dictatorship”. The fact
that the Tibetan resistance army up until 1959 was funded and trained
by the CIA is also irrelevant.

Below are two articles discussing the protests against the Olympic torch relay by supporters of Tibet's right to national self-determination. The first appeared in Green Left Weekly. The second is by Pierre Rousset, a member of the French Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) and editor of the Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
(ESSF) website. It was translated for Links -- International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- by Katie Cherrington.

***

Pro-Tibet protests grow — why Tibet deserves justice

By Tony Iltis

April 19, 2008 -- Australian Capital Territory (ACT)
police have been given enhanced stop-and-search powers for dealing with
protests planned for the Canberra leg of the global Olympic torch relay
on April 24. This comes as protests by the Tibetan diaspora and their
supporters have turned the torch’s world tour into a public relations
disaster for the Beijing Olympics.

On April 4, 1967, African-American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King addressed a gathering of religious antiwar activists at Riverside Church in New York City. On April 4, 1968, he was assassinated.

``I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a `thing-oriented' society to a `person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.'' -- MLK.

March 24, 2008 -- The Chinese army has Tibet and its provinces under tight control.
The repression of the ``rioters'' who have descended into the streets
these last two weeks has been severe. Solidarity and the effective
recognition of the right of the Tibetan people to self-determination is
urgent.

Some on the left (rare in France, but more numerous elsewhere)
refuse to commit to solidarity for fear of playing the game of the
United States against China. Others, on the right, call for
demonstrations against 59 years of Chinese occupation –- it was in
1950-1951 that the Peoples Liberation Army entered the country -– and
denounce a ``communist'' dictatorship. These two positions ``mirror''
one another, attaching little importance to history: the ``Tibetan
question'' arises in very different contexts according to different
periods.

March 28, 2008 -- A
demonstration by Buddhist monks in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, on March
10 to commemorate the anniversary of China’s crushing of the Tibetan
independence movement in 1959 triggered protests for self-determination
that, by March 14, had escalated into anti-Chinese riots in which 19
people were killed.

Over 100 Tibetans are reported to have been killed, and hundreds more arrested, by Chinese occupation forces.

This eruption of mass anger — that spread to cities throughout the
Tibetan Autonomous Region and the neighbouring provinces of Gansu,
Qinghai and Sichuan, historically part of Tibet and with large ethnic
Tibetan communities — was a response not only to the 58-year-old
Chinese military occupation of Tibet, but to the dispossession and
marginalisation of Tibetans by an influx of both global capital and Han
Chinese transmigrants.

The
previous article of this series showed that the basis for Kosova’s right to
self-determination is real, and that there has been a genuine, mass-based
striving for it all century. Yet some on the left have argued that Kosova’s
recent declaration of independence is merely an initiative of the imperialist
powers, which allegedly have had a long-term aim to create an ``independent’’
Kosovar state under their control.